"Posthouse" Review — Sid Lucero’s Slow-Burn Descent Hits Hard

Image courtesy of Viva Films

I’m not really a horror guy. Still trying to unlearn that instinct to flinch at jump scares that hit out of nowhere, and I’ve definitely skipped a lot of horror films over the years because I didn’t want to deal with the stress. Which brings me to a film like Posthouse. I've always leaned more into the kind of horror that gets deep under your skin, instead of pounding you to death with relentless jump scares. Would the film be more of the latter?

A troubled film editor (Sid Lucero) and his distant daughter (Bea Binene) release an ancient monster while working to restore an incomplete silent horror movie.

Nikolas Red, in his first outing as director, builds this lingering dread that’s just always there, not in your face all the time, but hanging around the edges of the frame like something’s waiting to happen, and you can’t look away because you know he’s gonna let you see it. That’s already a win for me, honestly. Because unlike his brother Mikhail, who loves drowning everything in pitch black shadows (Deleter, Nokturno), Nikolas actually lets us see what’s happening, and it turns out, that decision alone makes his scares land harder. The shadows here don’t hide anything, they stretch things out, they pull your anxiety forward, and when something finally does happen, it feels earned.

And sure, yeah, some of it feels familiar. You’ve seen versions of these scares before. But instead of being annoyed at the familiarity, you kind of admire it, because Nikolas knows what to steal and how to use it. He’s clearly watched a lot of horror, the good kind, and it shows. The references are obvious, but they don’t feel cheap. He’s remixing, not parroting. And it works.

Now Sid Lucero... man. The guy’s operating on another level.

He plays Cyril, this guy who’s slowly losing himself to the same obsession that supposedly took his father, finishing what might be the country’s first horror movie. It’s a role that could’ve easily tipped into cartoonish territory, but Lucero keeps it grounded, keeps it terrifying in that quiet, twitchy way. There’s a tension in his face, in the way he moves, that reminds me of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but not because he’s copying Jack. It’s more like he found a similar energy and just ran with it in his own direction. You can see him unraveling. Scene by scene, frame by frame. And you can’t stop watching him because even when nothing is happening, something is happening - in his eyes, in his hands, in the air around him.

Lucero’s been killing it lately, with Outside, An Errand, and now this. He’s got this thing where he disappears into roles, but also leaves something behind that only he could have brought. Like a fingerprint on every scene.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the cast can keep up.

Bea Binene, who plays Cyril’s daughter Rea, is trying; and you can tell she wants to meet the intensity Lucero brings, but it just doesn’t click. There’s a certain teleserye stiffness to her performance that feels out of place in this kind of film. She hits her marks and delivers her lines, but there’s no danger, no unpredictability, no real weight to her presence. You can almost see her acting. And when she shares scenes with Lucero, it becomes painfully obvious how wide the gap is. Someone like Maris Racal would’ve been a better fit, someone who can do grounded and haunting at the same time, especially after what she did in Sunshine. That kind of casting would’ve added a different dimension to the film’s emotional pull.

The other thing that kinda pulls the film down is the writing.

The script is credited to director Red, Jericho Aguado, and Kenneth Dagatan (In My Mother’s Skin), but honestly, the dialogue sounds like it was written by someone translating in their head while writing it down. It doesn’t flow naturally, especially in Filipino. Characters talk in stiff, phrase-heavy lines that don’t feel like real people talking, more like people trying to sound deep. Everyone except Lucero sounds like they’re in a different movie, or like they’re reading from a version of the script that didn’t go through enough drafts. Binene struggles the most with this, and the awkward phrasing doesn’t help her case. Lucero somehow makes a lot of these lines work anyway, and that alone is wild. You can feel him trying to find meaning in sentences that don’t land, and somehow dragging them toward something believable. That kind of commitment matters.

But let’s talk about the visuals, because that’s where the film shines the brightest outside of Lucero.

Steven Evangelio’s cinematography is so in sync with the film’s tone. He’s worked with Lucero before in An Errand, which explains the shorthand they seem to have. The way he shoots Cyril’s descent into madness is so precise, so beautifully messed up, that you start feeling boxed in with him. The camera lingers when it needs to, cuts away when you don’t want it to, and always seems to be in the exact wrong place at the right time. There are shots here that burn into your brain, not because they’re flashy, but because they feel like they’re watching you back.

Posthouse isn’t perfect. The dialogue falters, the casting isn’t airtight, and some of the horror beats are familiar. But the atmosphere is thick, the filmmaking is sharp, and Sid Lucero turns a shaky script into a character study you can’t stop thinking about.

Nikolas Red might still be working through some inherited weaknesses (especially in the writing department) but he’s also showing that he knows what makes horror effective, and he’s not afraid to let things simmer instead of explode. That restraint, that craft, and that lead performance carry this film into something worth watching.

Cinegeek Rating: B